Why Milton Matters A New Preface To His Writings

Wittreich demonstrates why Milton may prove to be the poet for the new millennium, in a book of interest to scholars and general readers. It engages the canonical Milton, as well as the Milton of popular culture, and uses the tools of theory- especially affective stylistics and reception history, to read Milton in his historical moment and our own.

Showing how Milton used words in the extraordinary ways he did, this book provides an account of Milton's writing life, before discussing 'keywords' - the keys to a text or a theory.

This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, religious, and social contexts across the globe and through the centuries. The book encompasses a rich range of different literary genres, artistic media, and academic disciplines and draws on the research of established Milton scholars and new Miltonists. Like the female authors and artists whom they explore, the contributors take up a variety of standpoints. As well as revisiting the work of established figures, the volume brings new female creative artists, new subjects, and new approaches to the study of Milton.

Our post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging category that it seeks to clarify and critique. It examines ethical and political engagement grounded in belief, with particular reference to the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Taken to an extreme, such engagement produces the cult of the suicide bomber. But the suicide bomber has also served as a convenient bogey for those wishing to distract us from the violence in Western and Christian traditions and for those who would dismiss too easily the vigorous iconoclasm that belief can produce. More than any other poet, Milton alerts us to both anti-humane and liberationist aspects of belief and shows us relevant dynamics of language by which such commitment finds expression.

A collection of new essays demonstrating a wholly new approach to the complexities of Milton's work.

Using Hannah Arendt’s account of the Greek polis to explain Milton’s fascination with the idea of public speech, this study reveals what is distinctive about his conception of a godly, republican oratory and poetics. The book shows how Milton uses rhetorical theory - its ideas, techniques and image patterns - to dramatise the struggle between ’good’ and ’bad’ oratory, and to fashion his own model of divinely inspired public utterance. Connecting his polemical and imaginative writing in new ways, the book discusses the subliminal rhetoric at work in Milton’s political prose and the systematic scrutiny of the power of oratory in his major poetry. By setting Milton in the context of other Civil War polemicists, of classical political theory and its early modern reinterpretations, and of Renaissance writing on rhetoric and poetic language, the book sheds new light on his work across several genres, culminating in an extended Arendtian reading of his ’Greek’ drama Samson Agonistes.

Milton, the Sublime and Dramas of Choice challenges readers and scholars to rethink Milton’s relationship to the sublime in terms of ethics. The book demonstrates that Milton’s sublimity merges the early modern reception of Longinus with classical, medieval, and Renaissance categories of magnanimity, wonder, and inspiration to investigate the relations between human and divine agency. Under the influence of early modern models of sublimity, including Spenser and Shakespeare, Milton speaks through his fictional characters about the making of heroic and literary virtue. In turn, the work also sheds light on the importance of tragedy as an additional source to the formation of the Renaissance sublime. Milton’s tragic plots illustrate how the character’s virtue is tested, strengthened, and eventually transformed into an experience of elevation. The study explores the heroic path from dramatic choice to self-realisation, offering extensive treatments of Milton’s dramas – A Maske and Samson Agonistes. The redefinition of the pairing “Milton and the sublime” in this work aims to relocate the poet within the English literary history as the climax of earlier traditions and receptions of the sublime, but also as the starting point of modern sublimity

Recent critical conversation has described John Milton’s major works as sites of uncertainty, irreconcilability, or even confusion—as texts that actually reflect radical incoherence and openness. These newer critical voices posit, moreover, that traditional critics must strain to find coherence and authorial control in Milton’s poetry. Richard DuRocher and Margaret Thickstun, together with an esteemed group of Milton scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical backgrounds, respond to this challenge. While accepting the presence of uncertainty and welcoming the multiple perspectives that Milton builds into his works, this volume offers a variety of nuanced approaches to Milton’s texts. As these eleven essays demonstrate, Milton’s own acts of interpretation compel readers to reflect not only on the rival hermeneutics they find within his works but also on their own hermeneutic principles and choices—an interpretive complexity that is integral to his poetry’s enduring appeal. Thus, each of the contributors takes up the problem of this interpretive dilemma in some way: several explore Milton’s own engagement with the texts of Scripture and the classics; some examine the ways in which Milton represents the process of interpretation in his narrative poems; and still others are intrigued by the challenges that Milton’s works present for the reader’s own interpretive skills. Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics, in responding directly to the “incertitude critics” of Milton, will be of interest to those on all sides of this debate and will certainly redirect the ongoing conversation.